Break of Dawn

‘’Night, Mam.’ Bridget stood looking down at Sophy for another moment or two before beginning to get ready for bed. In her cold little cell of a room she had always whipped off her dress and apron as fast as she could, and pulled her thick flannelette nightdress over her shift and petticoat. Even with the feather-filled eiderdown she had treated herself to a few winters back to augment the coarse brown blankets on her bed, she’d lain shivering for half an hour or more, no matter how tired she was. Now she undressed in front of the range, relishing the warmth, and was always asleep as soon as she snuggled under the covers heaped on the mattress. Sophy sometimes snuffled and sucked at her fingers but she didn’t mind that; it was comforting and flooded her with a quiet joy to know the baby was close at hand.

After laying her clothes on one of the armchairs and pulling on her nightdress, Bridget knelt down to say her prayers. Her parents had been born and raised as staunch Protestants in Ireland, leaving the Old Country for a new life in England before she was born, and had brought their only daughter up to believe unquestioningly in a Protestant God. Kitty had been sad when there were no more babies after Bridget, but had accepted it as God’s will and got on with her life, and there was much of her mother’s pragmatic approach to life in Bridget. Her prayers reflected this. First, she recited the Lord’s Prayer as she did each night, following this with requests for protection for each member of the household, lingering longer over little Sophy. The last third of her prayers centred on her own needs and since Sophy had been born, they were simple. ‘Please let the master and mistress keep her but let me look after her because You know they don’t really want her, dear God. I love her and I know her mam would have wanted me to take care of her. Bless Mrs Lemaire now at peace with You, in Your Holy Name. Amen.’

After putting out the oil lamp in the centre of the kitchen table, Bridget snuggled into bed by the faint light given out by the range and was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Not so Jeremiah.

It was pitch black in the bedroom; Mary insisted that not a chink of light was allowed into the room, and the heavily-lined velvet curtains at the window were closed against the storm raging outside. The storm inside his being was another matter. For the first time in his life he had been cast in the role of a transgressor and he was burning with righteous indignation.

He lay stiff and silent, listening to his wife’s steady breathing and small, ladylike snores.

Mary had made him feel like a sinner, like the worst kind of miscreant – and why? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Because he had wished to spare her the knowledge of his sister’s ignominy, that was all. No good purpose would have been served by offending her delicate sensibilities, and if things had remained as they were – as he had expected them to remain – she would never have known the shameful truth. He had told her that it had been his parents’ decision to explain Esther’s leaving with the story about warmer climes and a French husband, and that he had merely been respecting their wishes, that he had never – would never – keep anything from her in the normal way of things, that he had only been thinking of her tender emotions and the pain such a revelation would cause to one brought up as sensitively as she had been.

Mary had listened to his explanation in silence, her eyes gimlet hard and her face stony with condemnation. Then she had made the pronouncement which even now, two weeks later, had the power to make him squirm.

‘You have betrayed the trust my uncle placed in you when he introduced us, in the worst possible way. You are a false man, Jeremiah Hutton, and it gives me no pleasure to say so. I shall not disclose your cruel trickery to the bishop, nor to my parents or the rest of the family, not for your sake but for theirs. But do not expect me to condone such deceit by absolving you of your crime because I will not.’

Crime. Jeremiah ground his teeth. He had been made to feel like a criminal in his own home, sure enough. And now his sister’s bastard was to be raised in this house, a constant reminder of his fall from grace in Mary’s eyes.

Did she expect him to continue begging and pleading for her understanding in the coming weeks and months? Probably. Certainly she was displaying a spitefulness of which he would not have thought her capable, disguised under a pietistical facade which made his blood boil often as not.

He wouldn’t be able to stand it if this state of affairs continued. He stared into the blackness, self-pity choking him and causing him to swallow against the lump in his throat. He was a good husband. Mary had had no cause to complain in twelve years of marriage, and he doubted if there were many women who could say that in this town. And now, when he was asking for just a drop of the milk of human kindness, she had none to give. Well, so be it. He now knew where he stood. If she wanted to drive a perman ent wedge between them, she was going the right way about it. He’d had enough, more than enough, in the last weeks. Mary would see another man to the devoted husband she was used to over the next little while, and she had no one to blame but herself. If she had thought to crush him with her attitude, she was in for a shock. He would not be browbeaten in his own home and neither would he plea for her understanding again.

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